Hacker News Reader

yaroneon Show HN: FeyNoBg – Automatic background removal model and training library

I was so impressed with remove.bg in Dec 2018; awesome to see the progress in this area, so cool.

yaroneon Car Seats as Contraception

I wonder if self-driving cars and massively improved safety will solve this.

5 kids in a car, held, seated, seatbelted, any-which-way. Like on a train.

yaroneon An old photo of a large BBS (2022)

Ahh BBS's: where I learned the difference between a local call and a "local toll call" (parents were not happy)

yaroneon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://www.yarone.com/

Ancient and needs updating

yaroneon Windows-Use: an AI agent that interacts with Windows at GUI layer

Me too! With Sendkeys and some Win32 API calls, I wrote an AOL add-on (available through Keyword: addons) called AoLOL!. It was my first software business.

Q: How do you identify the AOL window? A: Look for an app with titlebar = "America[space][space]Online"

yaroneon Show HN: Canine – A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes

This is awesome, great work!

yaroneon Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups

Remember Accompany.com and Mercata and other group-buying websites from the 90's dotcom boom? Time for those again?

yaroneon Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

Nielsen's "Usability Engineering" was my FIRST EVER Amazon.com purchase in June 1998.

yaroneon File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern, robust interface

Ha, reminds me of XTREE GOLD, from the late 80's / early 90's. A time where the default file explorer was unbearable.

yaroneon Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

I absolutely loved VB3 thru VB6!

yaroneon Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games?

Roblox studio. My son is a sound designer for some of the top games there. He's also learning programming in Lua for Roblox platform.

It is a small community of mostly kids aged 15-25 as far as I can tell. It doesn't seem like any professional adult game developers are part of the community (I got an inside view when I took my son to RDC this year).

The top game developers are making millions of dollars per year (they're paid in Robux and converted to USD).

In short, thriving ecosystem with lots of kids having fun doing creative work including creating games, writing code, designing graphics, designing sound effects.

yaroneon The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is using video as an input

And car driver.

When I heard about how Tesla was training it's AI - without describing objects but instead through direct observation - it reminded me of Heinlein's "Door Into Summer" (1956). Heinlein's character teaches a multipurpose robot how to do any tedious human task through direct observation.

yaroneon Show HN: I made a tool to compare time zones

Also might be useful to some: in Google Cal, you can show a secondary time zone on left hand side. Mine shows PT and CT for example.

yaroneon Hard disk LEDs and noisy machines

Ha, back in 1995 I could HEAR in advance when my PC was going to crash. I could tell from the certain crunching / grinding sounds of the hard disk. I could hear it and think "Uh oh, here comes a crash..." And then blue screen of death.

yaroneon There's Waldo is a robot that finds Waldo (2018) [video]

From Heinlein's Waldo & Magic Inc, a fun and worthwhile read (and audiobook)

yaroneon When XML in Word Became Illegal

A classic Joel on Software article about funny backwards compatibility built into Excel: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

yaroneon We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT

Nice work, very cool!

yaroneon Ask HN: Why did Visual Basic die?

I used VB 3.0 thru VB 6.0 and I echo the sentiment: those were fun and productive times. Really solid integrated development environment centered around the desktop UI / form design / UI controls like buttons, textboxes, combo boxes, etc.

I also agree that the web changed everything and that is the major reason for the shift away.

yaroneon AOL pretends to be the internet

Wow this is surprising

yaroneon AOL pretends to be the internet

Ha, that scene is how I learned to program. Built a shareware tool called AoLOL! (available by going to keyword "Addon"), $14.95, got paper checks from all over the country! Then I met the ICQ founders...

yaroneon Recovering secret keys from devices using video footage of their power LED

We learned about affixing a camera to the data input / output LED's on a network interface card and by doing that capturing the ENTIRE data stream.

yaroneon Recovering secret keys from devices using video footage of their power LED

I learned about this exact exploit in my computer security class at University circa 1999 or 2000: "power LED is connected directly to the power line of the electrical circuit"

yaroneon Slide to Unlock

It's like traversing a bad "mega menu."

Did you know that "double-click" on early Windows literally meant "click the same pixel twice in rapid succession"?

yaroneon Show HN: TxtNet Browser – Browse the Web over SMS, No Wi-Fi/Mobile Data Needed

Very cool, great work!

yaroneon Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor

Another one that came to my mind: "The Fun They Had" by Asimov

"Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in the old days. She was thinking about the fun they had."

http://web1.nbed.nb.ca/sites/ASD-S/1820/J%20Johnston/Isaac%2...

yaroneon Keep your AI claims in check

I had the same thought!

Then, my next thought was:

Who (in industry) wrote this? (and got FTC to publish it? wanting to drive some agenda forward).

yaroneon Simulate Asteroid Impacts on Earth

I remember a similar app - way less sophisticated - at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

yaroneon XMODEM in 2022

As a kid in 1994 ish, through trial and error I learned that ZMODEM was the far more reliable way to download stuff (from a user POV).

yaroneon What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers

I'm with you guys here. My first program was an AOL...program. Learned how to program by copying some kids I met in private AOL chat rooms.

My first commercial program (shareware) was a legit AOL add-on (AoLOL!). Designed, built, and redesigned several times before I had the courage to ship it. Visual Basic 3.0. Used Win32 API to attach my program to the AOL toolbar (for AOL 2.5 and AOL 3.0). Had folks from all around the country send me a $14.95 check via US mail.

yaroneon AltWinDirStat

Me too, been using it for 10 years.